Blast Away!

Cool game, serious congradulations about getting it done as well. It's a rarity.

Your graphics are good for what you used, but you need to be careful about converting your screenshots. From the looks of it, they got converted from JPEG to BMP or vise versa. Makes them lose color information giving that grany look. I can see past that but others who are not so computer savy may think that's what the game actually looks like.

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Cool game, serious congradulations about getting it done as well. It's a rarity.

Yeah it took a hell of a lot of will power to finish this game off as best I could, rather than start teaching myself C++ and DX, for my next game. I'm still not happy with how the netplay turned out, but meh, the gameplay itself is finished.

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Your graphics are good for what you used, but you need to be careful about converting your screenshots. From the looks of it, they got converted from JPEG to BMP or vise versa. Makes them lose color information giving that grany look. I can see past that but others who are not so computer savy may think that's what the game actually looks like.

Yeah, they were huge bmps so I saved them as jpegs to get the file size down a bit, for uploading's sake. It's annoying that in doing that it stuffs up the screenshots a bit. Especially round the edges of things. Around the cannons and trees is where it's worst, but obviously there's none of that in game.

Thanks for the comments. How'd you find the AI? I've sent this to a couple of mates and they said that single player mode was a bit hard, having never played the game before before. I guess I should have allowed for the fact that I've been playing the game all the way through development, so I'm good at it. That and the fact that I wrote the AI, so I know how it 'thinks' and I know its weaknesses.
Thoughts?
Cheers,
metal

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Original post by metalmidget Yeah, they were huge bmps so I saved them as jpegs to get the file size down a bit, for uploading's sake. It's annoying that in doing that it stuffs up the screenshots a bit.

Images with large blocks of colour like yours are good candidates for lossless png compression. I'm not sure if it would give you small enough file sizes, but it's certainly worth a try.

If I take a screenshot, paste it into MS Paint, and then just Save As png, will that be lossless? Or do I need something else to achieve that?

there's a bug.

the game crushed while shooting.
i think it's because there were too many balls on screen than possible in your arrays.

kudos, reasonably fun too. I remember making a game like that during a lunch break with a friend while I was in college.

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Original post by ahillel there's a bug. the game crushed while shooting. i think it's because there were too many balls on screen than possible in your arrays.

Interesting, I've never had that happen before, and that's with both players firing lots and lots of shotgun shots. The array of bullets is 500 big for each player, and I'd be surprised if one player managed to get more than 500 bullets on screen. If it was a problem with referring to an array element beyond what exists, it's more likely that it was the powerups than the bullets. Not because the array was too small, but because there were problems with a loop going from 0 to Ubound(arrayname). During an early iteration, the size of the array could become smaller, but the loop still wants to go to what ubound(array) was when the loop started, so it can go too far. I was pretty sure I'd fixed that though, and I haven't seen any problems with that for a while now.

Do you remember the error message? Oh and were you running the game from the exe or from the IDE? If it was the IDE, what line did it highlight as the problem?

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Original post by PaulCesar kudos, reasonably fun too. I remember making a game like that during a lunch break with a friend while I was in college.

The original version, which just consisted of 2 shape controls for the cannons, 2 line controls for the barrels, a bunch of line controls as bullets, and a timer(*winces*), took about half an hour to make, I think? I then actually abandoned it for ages and started making a 2D platformer. After finishing one level of that I started having ideas for extra stuff to throw into this- ie powerups, graphics beyond black blobs on a grey background, proper health and ammo metres, etc etc, so I came back to it. It's taken me a long time to finish this because it was a big learning curve doing things 'properly'- drawing instead of controls, game loop instead of timer, creating proper classes(as proper as they get in VB6- inheritance consists of If statements to determine what particular variation of the class it is :S), that sort of thing. There are still a few things I could do better, like loading the images into memory instead of storing them in invisible picturebox controls on the form, but nothing substantial (that I know of). The other major time issue was school. I've been trying to pull my finger out and get the marks I need for my uni course next year, so the game has been pretty low priority.

Thanks for the comments,
metal